Coupled with lower operational and labour costs, it's considered that the nascent US gas industry could prove to be stiff competition to Australia.

Mr Strachan, author of investor broadsheet StockAnalysis, feels that the hype around the the US gas boom isn't taking into account the high cost of extracting this unconventional gas from shale and other tight rock formations.

"The amount of gas trapped in these formations is many times more than the amount of gas that's ever been trapped in conventional reservoirs.

"But the problem is the cost of extracting the gas from these areas of low permeability is three or four times the cost of extracting gas from conventional reservoirs.

"So the capital cost just continues, and with these unconventional wells, you tend to get about 75 per cent of the amount of gas that you're going to get from an individual well over the first 18 months.

"Then there's a very long and thin tail of production from these wells, so you have to keep drilling well throughout the life of the project.

"And what we've seen in North America, not so much in the gas but certainly in the shale oil and gas, is that the big companies have been selling out.

"Shell announced that it's selling 106,00 acres of its permits in the Eagle Ford Shale, which is a prime shale basin in South Texas.

"And BHP has just put up its hand to say it's selling half of its permits in the Permian Basin, Texas, USA."

Mr Strachan says the conventional gas reservoirs that underpin the Western Australian gas industry have a technical advantage in the quality and accessibility of the assets.

"Chevron's Gorgon Project on Barrow Island, Woodside Energy's North West Shelf Project and Pluto, Apache's Wheatstone Gas, are all good examples of that."

However, he says the new coal seam gas (CSG) projects in Queensland that are feeding into the export facilities still have a question mark hanging over them.

"It's yet to be seen how the CSG will go; there's a lot of talk about a shortage of gas to feed those projects.

"There's obviously a lot of gas in the ground, but what's concerning is you need to get the molecules of methane to the LNG facilities on Curtis Island off Gladstone in a timely fashion."